Brett Campbell’s superpower as a singer is his vulnerability. That’s not typical in metal, where vocalists tend to project either awe-inspiring power or violent aggression; high drama or arcane evil. There are moments on Pallbearer’s debut album, Sorrow And Extinction, where it sounds like it’s taking every ounce of his nerve to get through his lines. “Lost within the shade, I call out for a helping hand,” he warbles at the end of “Foreigner,” his voice sharpening as it ascends to grasp a pleading high note. In his Pitchfork review of Sorrow And Extinction, Brandon Stosuy described Campbell as “a young Ozzy [with] the ability to transform into Geddy Lee,” which would be even more apt if I ever thought Ozzy or Geddy might start crying during a take. His vulnerability is an invitation. Sorrow And Extinction might seem forbidding at first, with its esoteric cover art, crushing doom riffs, and monumental song lengths. Campbell’s voice wedges the album open, exposing its beating heart.
Sorrow And Extinction turns 10 today, and in the decade since its release, Pallbearer have become the rare metal act that plays to a seemingly equal mix of dyed-in-the-wool headbangers and indie-leaning generalists. That’s at least partly thanks to the fact that they were, somewhat surprisingly, critical darlings from the start. Sorrow got a glowing NPR review alongside its First Listen premiere, Pitchfork named it Best New Music, and it topped the 2012 year-end metal list on this very website. The Arkansas band’s albums have gotten, by turns, proggier (Foundations Of Burden), dreamier (Heartless), and more elemental (Forgotten Days), but Sorrow And Extinction remains the pinnacle of their excellent catalog. (I say that as someone who walked down the aisle to Foundations highlight “Worlds Apart” at my own damn wedding.) It’s the sound of a great band arriving fully formed, carving a new path for themselves while nodding to the legends who made their ascension possible.
Foremost among those legends, of course, is Black Sabbath. Their best work is alive with the terror and exhilaration of tapping into something beyond the earthly, and that same sense of awe permeates Sorrow And Extinction. “Who is this figure shrouded in the veil of death?” Campbell asks as “The Legend” swells to its climax. If that’s not an intentional homage to the “What is this that stands before me?” opening of “Black Sabbath,” it’s certainly a subconscious one. Another key touchstone is Candlemass, the Swedish epic doom godfathers who reimagined the way melody and heaviness can coexist in a metal context. The songs on Sorrow And Extinction are certainly heavy as hell, but it’s their swirling columns of lead guitar and towering vocal hooks that stand out more vividly than the seismic weight of their riffs. The most direct line of influence can be drawn from Warning, whose frontman Patrick Walker is Campbell’s truest antecedent as a singer. Their 2006 cult classic, Watching From A Distance, foregrounded raw, heartfelt emotion in an unusually unvarnished way for the metal genre. Pallbearer’s debut did the same.
We wouldn’t still be talking about Sorrow And Extinction in 2022 if it was merely meticulous mimicry, though. Pallbearer immediately had both the chops and the inspiration to transcend the sum of their influences. That’s evident from the moment you drop the needle on “Foreigner” and are greeted with the sound of a nylon-string guitar, its lonesome chords ringing out into the darkness. A quiet drum pattern joins in to accompany it after about two minutes, which only serves to emphasize the amount of negative space the band has been luxuriating in up to that point. Technically, the opening of “Foreigner” is an acoustic album intro — by no means a new trick in the metal playbook. Yet it’s undeniably integral to the song, a bold but necessary counterweight to the crunching, lugubrious riff that finally replaces it two and a half minutes in. What follows is a masterclass in melodic doom metal. For 12 minutes, Campbell and co-guitarist Devin Holt build a palace of stately, interlocking riffs, gracefully toggling the song’s tempo between “slow” and “slower,” while Campbell soars overhead with what still may be the finest vocal performance of his career.
There’s a visceral, live-in-the-room quality to the performances on “Foreigner,” and the band reinforces it throughout the rest of the album. Campbell, Holt, bassist Joseph Rowland, and drummer Zach Stine (who would exit the band shortly after the recording) play doom metal like a great jazz ensemble — locked-in but loose — and everyone gets the chance to shine. “The Legend” is a showcase for Rowland’s bass, Stine gets to swing like Bill Ward through the back half of “Devoid Of Redemption,” and Campbell and Holt trade colossal yet conversational guitar solos with one another on every song. Deadbird’s Chuck Schaaf produced the record, and to his credit, he mostly lets the tape run and stays out of the way. Plenty of doom bands can obliterate you with volume. Pallbearer want you to hear the nuance in everything they’re doing.
Still, the most important element about Sorrow And Extinction, and the reason it endures, is its powerful emotional core. Its five epic-length songs are scaled to the cosmos, but Pallbearer have a way of making the cosmic feel intimate, the planetary feel personal. The album’s closing track, “Given To The Grave,” opens with a wash of ghostly kosmische synth and a plodding thump of bass, joined a minute later by an aching lead guitar line. Everything drops out shortly after, only to be replaced by a moan of feedback and a plaintive clean guitar passage. It’s not until the song eclipses the five-minute mark that the full band jumps in. Atop a rumble of fuzz and a clatter of cymbals, Campbell delivers the song’s only lines:
Carry me to my grave
When at long last my journey has ended
On the path that leads from here into oblivion
Where no more sorrow can weigh me down
He sounds defeated, possibly even dead. That’s when “Given To The Grave” finally erupts. Campbell and Holt trade soaring, majestic solos for the remainder of the song, indulging in some of the most ostentatious guitar heroics they unleash on the entire album. When their soloing winds down, the planetarium synths take back over. We’re gazing at the stars. Perhaps someday our energy will be among them.
